Tag Archives: Property

In Part 3 of Anna Karenina, Tolstoy has Dolly decamp to her country house to save money. It’s an expedient move: the fishmonger, the woodmaker and the shoemonger are chasing for unpaid debts. Her daughter has been very ill. Her husband has been sleeping with the nanny of their six children. She goes away with her children, believing that the country will offer “salvation from all city troubles, that life there, though not elegant…[is] cheap and comfortable.” (I am quoting here from the award-winning translationby crack husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.)

Country houses were no joke in those days. Here is Tolstoy’s own country house, the 32-room Yasnaya Polyana. This is a writer who knew the toll of seasons of hard weather on a country estate, and the real burden that supporting two residences can put on its owners.

The country does not live up to Dolly’s expectations. Her husband has been looking after the house. “Stepan Arkadyich, who, like all guilty husbands, was very solicitous of his wife’s comfort, looked the house over himself and gave orders about everything he thought necessary. To his mind, there was a need to re-upholster all the furniture with cretonne, to hang curtains, to clean up the garden, make a little bridge by the pond and plant flowers; but he forgot many other necessary things, the lack of which later tomented Darya Alexandrovna.”

What she finds is leaks, no cook, not enough cows for milk and butter, only roosters, and no one to wash the floors as everyone is working in the potato fields. The wardrobes open and close at the wrong times. There are no ironing boards.

Just when everything is looking bleak, a housekeeper appears and masterfully shapes up the house. “The roof was repaired, a cook was found, chickens were bought, the cows began to produce milk, the garden was fenced with pickets, the carpenter made a washboard, the wardrobes were furnished with hooks and no longer opened at will, an ironing board, wrapped in military flannel, lay between a chair arm and a chest of drawers, and the maids’ quarters began to smell of hot irons.”

(Here is a surprising picture of Tolstoy at 20: so unlike the bearded radical of later years. Looks like someone who would know about high society misbehaviour.)

With fast food, pressed clothes, and working cupboards, Dolly starts to feel at home in the country. The genius of Tolstoy is in these details. It’s not Anna Karenina who compels you through the book: although she gets top billing, she’s a cool and fairly flat character, what James Meek calls a mysterious absence at the heart of Anna Karenina. No, it’s the human truth in the detail, how the husband behaves when he’s guilty, and how the wife regains some order in her world by making the cupboards open and close at the right times, that drives the novel right through the centuries onto our shelves and screens today.

But back to our subject of country houses. For me, Dolly makes a mistake in thinking that the country should replicate the city. You see it happening all the time in magazines and property sections: glossy pictures of the second or even third home that’s immaculate, designer-perfect. Just the thought of all that work, to keep not just one but two or three homes looking decent, makes me feel exhausted. And I’m sure the husbands aren’t doing the upholstery.

A city house is on display. Windows are bay-shaped, made to be looked into. Curtains need to hang well, the carpets should be clean. Your clothes can’t be disheveled as you make your way blinking into the morning. The country is different: it’s the place where you go to not be on display. That’s the point of it. No corner shop, no delivery service, no wifi. Nothing for the children to do but scrabble around in the mud and make up adventure games. And for the adults it’s long walks in wellies, a bit of Tolstoy, and gallons of excellent cheap wine. Two changes of clothes is more than enough, you hardly get around to hanging them in the wardrobes which may or may not close. As Judith Warner writes in her perfect column about another chaumiere in Normandy: “Everything’s fine the way it is.”

Like this:

Everyone gave us reasons not to buy a house in France. The impenetrable legal system. Totalitarian mayors. Unthinkable plumbing and sewage systems. The Euro! (This last, in retrospect, was probably the best reason). Everyone we knew seemed to have a friend who had had terrible trouble with a property transaction in France. Practical strangers volunteered their (mostly negative) opinions. We had bought and sold homes in London, never in France. London had not been easy. We expected the worst.

No gazumping! Rather wonderfully, the written purchase offer, the offre d’achat, prevents the seller from showing the house or considering any other offers after yours has been accepted. Having been gazumped (outbid after our offer was accepted) a few times in London, this started things out on a positive footing, for once.

No surveyor! Surveyors feature prominently in London property exchanges, though it remains unclear to me what value they add. The sale price never seems to change, no matter what horrors the surveyor finds in the house you are buying. And there is always something that is not discovered by the surveyor – the boiler, inevitably, breaks down beyond repair the week after you move in. In France, our seller had kept excellent records of all works done on the cottage. He was a retired builder from Paris’s 16th arrondissement, and he had looked after the cottage carefully. Moreover, the French legal system requires the seller to secure independent reports on heating, electrics, asbestos and much more. Those reports were more thorough than anything we had paid a surveyor for in London.

No lawyers! In UK property transactions, every step you take, every move you make is a legal one. The lawyers wrangle over which surveys can be done and which appliances are included in the sale and what will be done on which date. In France, property exchanges are overseen by the notaire, a public official who conducts searches, prepares documents, and collects the taxes. The same notaire acts for both parties. The process is heavily regulated and requires extensive disclosures from the seller, meaning we didn’t need a lawyer to secure the right documentation or set an appropriate timeline.

Meet the notaire! In the UK, completion is purely a legal act, done by fax and email. It is quite possible that you might never meet the seller in the flesh. (They are running away before you discover all those faults the surveyor didn’t spot). In France, the Acte de Vente is an event. The buyer and the seller meet at the notaire’s office. Our notaire was based in a low-slung, modern building near the centre of a market town. The entrance had the feel of a GP’s office, but inside the corridors and offices were lined with traditional glass-fronted mahogany book cases that were stuffed from floor to ceiling with fat, ancient legal texts. The notaire was youngish, very tall, and utterly professional. During the previous weeks he had proven particularly effective at convincing French bank clerks to do their jobs in a timely manner. Intriguingly, there was no sign of a computer in his office. The huge desk which stretched diagonally across the room, leaving the rest of us an odd triangular space in which to arrange ourselves, was entirely covered with untidy stacks of case files. The meeting lasted about an hour. The notaire went through the paperwork section by section, checking that all was in order. Finally we all signed each page of the contract, and by the end my hand ached. And then we all shook hands with each other several times, and the notaire hurried us out and went off to greet his next appointment.

Welcome home! Like sellers in London, estate agents tend to disappear from the scene once the exchange is done. In France, our estate agent – mid fifties, easy-going and athletic, always up for a drink and chat and never even a bit pushy – had made other arrangements. We would all, he announced, go back to the cottage after the completion. And so we did – the estate agent, the seller, as well as the seller’s daughter and granddaughter, a couple from down the street, and the children from next door. We drank champagne which the estate agent had arranged with the seller to chill at the cottage in advance. There were candies and cakes for our children. Our seller, glass in hand, took us around the house again – showing us every light fixture, where the pipes were situated, how the electrics worked, hidden cupboards he had designed, and we could see how much he loved the cottage and how sad he was to leave. We knew he would be returning to the area for medical check-ups, and we invited him to visit when he did, and knew that he would. And then everyone left, and we walked down to the end of our garden and finished the champagne, watching the boats go past on the Seine.

Everyone told us that buying a house in France would be hard. For us, buying the house was the easy part. Our seller and the estate agents were a true joy to work with. The hard thing – the thing that nearly scuppered the whole deal – was our French bank account.

We were warned to get a French bank account even before we found a property. That dealing with French banks was hard. We didn’t believe it could be that hard. For four reasons.

My husband has worked for two of the major French banks

Among my husband’s clients today are all of the major French banks

My husband speaks fluent French

My husband already had a bank account in France

In a past life, my husband did a stint as a G.O., or Gentil Organisateur, at Club Med. This involved a bit of teaching tennis, a bit of acting, a bit of customer service, and a lot of partying by the beach in Corsica.

* Image is representative only

Incredibly, he was paid for this work, and the money went into a French bank account. And stayed there for two decades, while he embarked on his proper, respectable career. Then one day my husband went looking for his account details to help buy a property in France.

As soon as we had our offer on the house accepted, we got in touch with the bank. The account was pre-digital: there was no cheque book, no credit card, and no cash card. And most importantly, no RIB. The RIB, or rélévés d’identité bancaire, is a piece of paper that shows your bank account details and address. To do anything financial in France, you need the RIB. To get a utilities account. To pay the phone bill. To get insurance. To buy a house.

The bank assigned us a Conseillère personelle, or customer advisor. She was polite and well-spoken. She advised that it would be no problem to get an RIB, cheque book and bank card. This was two months before we needed the RIB.

A week later, we had a phone call. Copies of our passports were needed. We promptly had these notarised and sent them on. We also started transferring funds into the account.

Two weeks passed. Nothing arrived in the mail. We phoned, and discovered our conseillère had taken her summer holidays and would be returning two weeks before our deadline. We were assured this would not cause a problem as everything was in order. We went on holiday.

We returned to find a hand-written letter from our conseillère. An apology? No – a request to see our wedding certificate and proof of the source of the funds we had transferred into our French bank account. Just in case we were up to something. No RIB could we issued until it was confirmed we were not terrorists.

We sent off the requested evidence. We started to panic. With only ten working days to go before we closed on the house, we had to transfer funds to the notaire’s account (a sort of escrow account), or we would not be able to close.

Five days passed. And then, joy! The RIB arrived. Now we would be able to transfer funds to the notaire. We phoned our conseillère. But once again, she was on holiday. But it was no problem they told us – she would be back in two days’ time, the day before we were due to close. And no, there was no one else who could, or would, help us.

At this point, two things happened. First, my husband logged a complaint with his contact at the bank. Second, the notaire, nervous about getting his fee, decided to take things into his own hands. He called the bank.

And then everything fell into place. Our funds were transferred. We closed on the house. We still haven’t, however, received a cheque book or a bank card. We wonder whether our conseillère was reprimanded, and is now exacting her revenge. We’re considering changing banks. But could we really go through the pain, again?

It took us six years to find a house in Normandy. We started visiting the region when our older daughter was almost one. She was learning to speak, and we wanted French to feel as close to native as it could to a child living in London. When we bought Les Iris she was seven, and her sister three.

Why did it take us so long?

There are several reasons. The one I want to dwell on today is the technology of buying a house in France. If you don’t live in France, it’s hard to get excellent information about French property. Even if you speak French fluently as we do (full disclosure: by we, I mean my husband).

I do everything online. And have been, for the last 10 years. I buy food online. I buy clothes online. I buy Christmas online. I bought my kitchen sink online.

Really. When you have young children and a full-time job, shopping is one of the things that disappears. Fast. Walton Street, Marylebone High Street, Westfield: who has the time? Five minutes in the pharmacy at lunchtime is as close as I get to physical shopping these days. So I went online.

When you shop for a property in London there are wonderful websites like Zoopla and Globrix. You can look at property for sale on a specific street. You can see what properties have been bought recently nearby, and for how much. You can find out the crime rate, and which schools are best. For France it was even more important to have this information before driving up to five hours to see each property.

The information just wasn’t there, or I couldn’t find it. There is detailed historical population and employment data available from INSEE. But I wasn’t able to find information about crime rates, school rankings or property sales. Is this stuff really not out there? Does anyone know? If you do, please let me know.

More than anything, I wanted a website that would let me search by location. I wanted to look at the satellite imagery of the area around a house even before I talked to an agent let alone made the trip to France. I never found a site that did this, exactly. Often agents wouldn’t even share the coordinates of a property so that we could plug them into our satnav. Many rendevous were arranged in parking lots outside churches and town halls. Perhaps the agents were afraid we would try to cut a direct deal with the owner.

Floor plans were extremely hard to come by. At best, there was a hand-drawn approximation. Pictures on property websites were often partial, hiding the major road behind the hedge, or the electric pylon at the end of the garden, or the old mines under the property that were in danger of caving in at any moment.

Many homes we saw were listed as ‘habitable’. Some of these were in excellent condition. Others had holes in the roof, asbestos in the walls, no heating or no discoverable sewage system.

Things have improved recently. The site where we found our cottage, Green-Acre (formerly ImmoFrance), has gathered traction with estate agents, and today the site lists over 70,000 French properties in all of the major European languages. You can search for property by town or area and sign up for email updates about new properties. CapiFrance.co.uk, which has a network of estate agents working under its brand name, has a portal in both French and English, and has listings from over 300 estate agents.

We also did a lot of offline research. We bought property magazines. The French like to own country homes, and Normandy is near enough to Paris that it attracts editorial attention. The magazines Maisons Normandes and Belles Demeures can be picked up in newsagents. There are also property specials in weekly news magazines like Le Point.

Late in the day, we discovered that notaires, as well as estate agents, can hold property listings. Often these will be advertised on a board outside of the notaire’s office, or in the regional trade publications available in the reception of the local notaire’s office.

We got to know local estate agents. We walked around the towns we liked and noted down the names of estate agents, then built up a relationship. In person they were friendly, full of local information, and professional. They’re also a pleasure to work with once you find a house and I’ll write more about that later.

Agents we spoke to included Patrice Besse, a Paris-based agency specialising in castles and manor houses with a significant portfolio in Normandy. This is property porn at its best: very little you can afford, and looking at it will suck hours from your life. There’s even an iphone app. More realistic in our bit of Normandy were Cany immobilier and Le Forestier.

In the end, we did find our property online. Technology caught up with us and one morning there it was, in my inbox. Les Iris.